Ted Cruz dominates the conservative market with two more early endorsements

Ted Cruz is on a roll. The conservative contender for the U.S. Senate has earned a pair of endorsements from well-connected national conservative leaders.

These latest endorsements, coming on the heels of three important national conservative endorsements in the past two weeks, boosts the candidacy of the former Texas Solicitor General as he tries to connect with party insiders and create a statewide brand a year before the 2012 GOP primary.

Kelly Shackelford, the president and chief executive officer of the Liberty Institute and Edwin Meese III, a former U.S. Attorney General under President Ronald Reagan, both threw their support behind Cruz in his race for retiring Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison‘s Senate seat.

“These are two stalwarts of the conservative movement. Shackelford is one of the most trusted conservative leaders in Texas and…Meese has spent a lifetime keeping President Reagan’s legacy of conservative principles alive,” Cruz said.

Those endorsements and the three Cruz picked up last week from Club for Growth, the FreedomWorks PAC and the hard-right redstate.com, come more than a year-and-a-half before any voters will cast their ballots in the potential six-way race.

Jim Henson, the director of the Texas Politics project at the University of Texas, said candidates seek and boast about early endorsements to communicate with party insiders.

“These early endorsements are not really for voters,” Henson said. “They are used to send signals to insiders as this is really the pre-election phase.”

Early endorsements, Henson said, are also a way to define a candidacy in a large race.

Henson said Cruz’s lack of name recognition through Texas may harm the former Solicitor General come November 2012, but gaining supporters early will help Cruz reach out to important conservative groups that can mobilize their followers.

“Because he is well-liked inside the party and because he is appealing to a highly-mobilized section of the party, the Tea Party,” Henson said, “I think you have to consider him as a fairly serious contender.”